The GOP's 48-hour debt ceiling makeover

Speaker John Boehner laid out what many in Washington already knew as he stood before House Republicans at his party’s retreat last week: The GOP needed a new plan to tackle the debt ceiling. Trying to force President Barack Obama to slash trillions of dollars in spending against the backdrop of default simply wouldn’t work this time around.

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Boehner: No budget, no pay

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“With three deadlines practically upon us — debt limit, sequester and [fiscal year] 2013 appropriations — the [normal plan] is not an option,” Boehner said Thursday morning, according to sources in the room. “That means we will have to develop a plan very quickly. The stakes are very high. That makes the discussion we are about to have very critical.”

Then came the salesman: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a conservative with lots of credibility among the hard-core budget hawks in the room, described three options for resolving the debt standoff. The last one — and the option leading Republicans preferred — was to reorder the fiscal fights to hike the debt ceiling now, battle over government funding in March and then lift the debt cap again in the spring.

The leadership followed by doing something it has often failed to do given what some gripe is a top-down management style — it simply listened.

The result was widespread agreement among a fractious Republican Conference that hasn’t been able to unify around much of anything over the past two years. In roughly 48 hours during a retreat in Williamsburg, Va., Republicans went from defense to offense and created more of an agenda for themselves in the 113th Congress. They also retreated from a core mantra of their majority — that the debt ceiling must be matched by spending cuts of an equal or greater magnitude. It was the swiftest and most drastic position shift of Boehner’s speakership.

On Wednesday, House Republicans — many of whom had threatened to plunge the nation into default — will vote on suspending the debt ceiling until May with as little fanfare as Democrats did when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was speaker. The plan is likely to pass, Republican lawmakers and aides said.

The plan is this: suspend the debt ceiling until May 19 while allowing the president to borrow enough to fund government expenditures until then. That will essentially reorder the legislative fights in their favor, Republicans believe, allowing them to focus on the sequester and funding for the government first and the debt ceiling later. They will, however, tie strings to the package — requiring the Senate to pass a budget by the middle of April, or senators would not get paid.